stainache
by bravevulnerability
Summary: "Kate," he rasped, tentatively slipping a hand under her neck and sliding the other down to rest along her side, feeling the warm rush of blood sluicing through the spaces between his fingers. "Please, Kate, please don't leave me. Not again," Based on a tumblr prompt. Cover art by half0utloud.


_**A/N: Written for a prompt received on tumblr: **__Kate is shot in the chest again (with her vest on) but it triggers Castle's PTSD._

_**Title borrowed from artist, Emma Louise. **_

_**Set mid season 4 (post Kill Shot, 4x09 - pre 47 Seconds, 4x19)**_

* * *

It all happened so fast.

Their suspect was just a kid, only nineteen, and just from the look on his face, Beckett and her team knew he was utterly terrified and willing to surrender. He had just needed to calm down, put the gun down, and it all would have been okay.

After only a few reasonable assurances from Beckett's soothing voice, the trapped look in the boy's wild eyes had slowly begun to fade. Castle had only been a few feet away, watching from the sidelines like she had demanded, but still close enough to see the moment things went wrong.

Kate had just coaxed him into carefully lowering his weapon, but just when Castle thought they were in the clear, that the standoff was over, the squawk of an approaching squad car spooked their young suspect and he fired without thinking. Fired at Kate.

She went down from the force of impact, completely knocked off her feet and to her back on the concrete. It happened in seconds, but it felt like torturous slow motion to Castle as he shouted her name and hustled past the surrounding officers, instantly falling to his knees at her side. Her wide eyes stared up at him, pupils blown with fear, a gasp caught in her throat, and suddenly they were back in the cemetery – dirty sidewalk turned to green grass and the gray forecast of the sky a perfect blue, and screaming, everyone was screaming.

_Beckett's down! Beckett's down! _

No, no, not again.

"Kate," he rasped, tentatively slipping a hand under her neck and sliding the other down to rest along her side, feeling the warm rush of blood sluicing through the spaces between his fingers. "Please, Kate, please don't leave me. Not again, I can't-"

He had to protect her. Can't have her in the crosshairs, not again. The sniper, what if he came back for her, what if he -

"Castle," Her feeble voice cut through the fog of panic and his stinging eyes shot upwards to see hers staring up at him with concern, and pain, but not the immense, paralyzing kind of pain a bullet in her chest would cause. She was merely wincing.

He blinked, glanced back down to the hand splayed over the side of her ribcage. He'd sworn he had felt the hot, sticky trail of blood oozing out of her, but his hands were clean. There was no blood.

"Castle," she called again, more certain this time, understanding laced into her tone. "I have a vest on, Rick. I'm not – I'm not dying."

Castle tore his eyes away from her for the briefest of moments, caught the pitiful looks of sympathy Ryan, Esposito, and the rest of the officers on the scene were giving him as he sat there hunched over her body like a human shield, like he could save her this time.

Rick cleared his throat and released her after gingerly guiding her body into a sitting position. He began to stand, seeing a medic striding her way, but Kate caught his hand before he could make any sort of escape.

His vision flitted from the hand clasped over his to the Kevlar vest she wore, the vest that had saved her life, and he couldn't help but focus solely on the bullet lodged between the L and the I of the standard POLICE logo across the front.

"Beckett, I'm – I think I'm going to go for a walk."

She bit her lip apprehensively and he nearly growled at himself right there in front of her because she had just been shot in the chest, again, and he was making her worry about him while her upper body was probably ablaze in agony.

"Are you sure?" she asked, squeezing the hand her fingers were still wrapped around.

He didn't want to leave her, and by the way her hand was inching into a full palm-to-palm hold with his, she wasn't too thrilled with the idea of him going off on his own either. But he really didn't want Kate Beckett to see him cry, especially not over her and his own unresolved personal issues.

"C'mon Castle, come sit with me in the ambulance while they check me out."

"No," he blurted too sharply, immediately causing her hand to fall away.

Castle pursed his lips and scraped a hand through his hair. "No, I'm sorry, Kate. I can't."

He couldn't sit in an ambulance with her. Not after he had seen her die the last time they were in one together.

He murmured one last apology and then hastily started walking until he couldn't see the blue and red lights flaring in his peripheral vision or feel her anxious eyes burning holes into his back anymore.

* * *

Kate sighed in relief, then winced in painful discomfort, as she stepped inside her apartment. Of course after she had gotten the all clear from the paramedics, Gates had sent her home, assuring her that they had everything handled, and for once she didn't argue with her superior. The case was closed and she was exhausted.

Her vest had taken most of the damage, softened the bullet's blow, but the impact still had her chest catching fire every time she took too deep of a breath.

It was an all too familiar ache.

Obviously, the pain was not nearly as bad as it had been during the recovery of her last shooting. The sting was less violent, less pressing, and more like the feeling of being shot with a paintball gun if she had to make a comparison.

Her lips tugged upwards. She knew what that felt like after allowing Esposito to drag her to one of his weekend games back when they were still rookies. It hurt, it stung, but it left after a week or so.

A bullet wound's healing process was not nearly so neat nor so brief. And not just in the physical sense.

She doubted she could play paintball these days even if she wanted to. Being shot at, even if it was just with balls of neon colored paint, felt like too great of a risk for her mental state. Yet, two hours ago she had been shot with an actual bullet, and so far she was feeling…okay, straddling the line between fine and not, a line she often tripped over so easily without trying.

She would call Burke before dinner; attempt to set up an appointment for as soon as possible. Just to be safe.

Therapy helped. She hadn't had any more serious panic attacks since that last sniper case they had worked a couple of months ago, but she had just been shot square in the chest once again and, although not as prominent, she could feel the flashbacks in the dark shadows at the edges of her vision, waiting for a moment of weakness to pounce and drag her under.

She had seen such flashbacks practically playing out for her in Castle's eyes earlier at the scene as he'd hovered above her on the sidewalk. The similarities, from the cry of her name to her view below him as he had tried to hold her together with his quivering hands, had left her almost believing she was back there too, dying again in the cemetery with a bullet in her heart. She was trying so hard not to remember.

_Don't leave me. Stay with me. I love you. I love you, Kate._

Her elbows stabbed into her knees as she buried her hands in her hair and squeezed her eyes shut.

She would fight this; she knew she could. She was still the fearlessly badass Detective Beckett who possessed the ability to stare death down without blinking. She could still be that woman. Not this crumpled up, weak thing that was always on the brink of a panic attack.

She could handle this; she just had to put her mind to it.

Kate exhaled deeply and summoned his voice, his words of encouragement from her first case back this past fall, let it echo in her head like a mantra, the way it always did when she needed it most:

_Take it easy, Kate. You've got this. You've got th-_

There was a loud knock at her front door and she nearly fell from the sofa to a crouch on the floor of her living room.

Okay, so maybe it wasn't so easy.

The knocking persisted with a sense of urgency and she huffed as she shuffled from the living room to her apartment's entryway. She had a feeling she knew who was on the other side, but spared a glance through the peephole anyway.

"Hey Castle," she greeted him with a shaky but genuine smile. It dissolved the moment she got a decent look at him.

It had only been a few hours since she had seen him last, but he looked absolutely ragged. Hair tousled, shirt half untucked, eyes bordering on bloodshot - he was suffering from this just as much as she was. If not more.

"I wasn't there," he said helplessly, his voice an uneven croak as the words tumbled free, and her fingers itched to reach out and smooth away the lines of distress carved so deeply into the skin of his face. "I wasn't there, Kate, I-"

"No, Castle, shh," she breathed, reaching for him before he could say more and cradling his head to her shoulder before she could stop herself. "It's okay, I'm okay." she promised, stroking trembling fingers through his oily hair; she imagined he'd been doing the same thing all day. He did that when he was nervous or stressed - raked his fingers through his hair over and over until it was disheveled beyond repair.

"We're okay, Rick."

They remained in her open doorway for a few minutes before he finally lifted his head from her shoulder and gave her an apologetic quirk of his lips.

"I'm sorry, Beckett, I-"

"Don't," she murmured, the hand that had managed to wrap around his nape migrating to squeeze his shoulder. "Don't apologize. Just come in."

* * *

Kate had been prepared to suggest they take a seat on her couch, maybe discuss him staying over for dinner since the sun was already beginning to set and she'd skipped lunch, but Castle couldn't remain still, pacing the expanse of her living area until she softly called his attention.

"Talk to me, Castle."

Rick stopped near the dining room table and exhaled heavily through his nose.

"Did it hit the same spot?"

Kate didn't ask him to elaborate, only began unbuttoning her dress shirt in the middle of her kitchen, letting him see the blooming array of forming colors fanning between her breasts.

Her second shot to the chest would leave her with a bruise and an ache in her sternum that would last for a matter of days. The first shot, the more permanent of the two, was a few inches to the left from where the bullet had hit her earlier today and almost unnoticeable for once due to the overshadowing display of colored bruising unfurling across her skin.

Castle cautiously moved closer, eyes zeroing in on the marks that mottled her skin, and spent a few moments assessing the damage before flicking his gaze back to her face.

"They're side by side."

She nodded, diverting her eyes. "Yeah."

"Does it…even though you had the vest, does it irritate your scar? To have that pain and the swelling so close?"

She swallowed and offered a little shrug of her shoulders.

"Kind of. It still pulls a little every now and then regardless, throbs and itches, but I think it'll be okay. Nothing I haven't handled before." she sighed, and then pursed her lips in regret.

Her shooting, and the summer that followed – their summer apart – was still such a sensitive subject between them. One more thing they never talked about.

"At least I didn't blurt out my feelings for you this time."

Her eyes flew up to meet his, her jaw simultaneously falling slack at the weary remark. She had expected a dark, narrowed gaze when she looked up at him, but instead he wore a sad smile that forced no blame upon her.

There was no venom in his words, no accusation on his face; there was only acceptance. He accepted that she had heard him that day, that she knew, and it all made her heart break a little more.

"Oh, Castle," she murmured, closing the few feet of distance between them and dropping her head to his shoulder.

She felt him hesitate before reluctantly placing his hands on her hips. It made her chest burn, but she snaked her arms around his waist, dug her fingers into the back of his shirt to keep them from involuntarily slipping away.

It took a bit longer than she had hoped for him to relax in her embrace, but he eventually did, and she hummed softly in approval when he moved one hand upwards to tenderly cup the back of her skull and comb his fingers through the loose waves of her gossamer locks.

It didn't take long for the hand still lingering on her hipbone to venture tentatively up her side, under the flap of her shirt, and gently trace the raised flesh he found there too.

Kate stepped back, out of his touch, and slipped the blouse from her shoulders, letting it flutter to the floor, exposing it all to him.

Rick's hand returned to settle over the near exact spot it had earlier when she was lying on her back on the sidewalk, as if he had already memorized the anatomy of her injuries without ever having seen them before now. His large palm easily spanned over the length of the surgical scar that marred her torso, just along the cage of her ribs where they had cut her open and dug the bullet out.

"You're beautiful, Kate." he told her seriously as his eyes finally roamed from her insecurities and onto the rest of her bared skin, drinking in the sight of the flat plane of her stomach, the swell of her breasts under the lace cups of her bra, the exquisite line of her collarbone.

She felt her chest flush and turned away, self-consciousness rearing its ugly head.

"I don't want this to be all you see when you look at me." she mumbled, attempting to cross her arms over her nearly naked upper body only to end up hissing when her newest injury protested at the movement.

"Kate, this," he said, delicately brushing his fingertips over her scar. "is not what I see, not when I look at you. It's a part of you, not everything."

She shook her head. "It _changed_ everything. I didn't want you to have to see how…how damaged I am," she rasped, fingers automatically rising to hover over the round, puckered flesh in the middle of her sternum only to stumble across his still resting there. "I wanted to be better than this, more than this, so we could actually have a shot. I didn't want-" She swallowed around the words she'd wished to be rid of by now. "I didn't want to be broken."

"I love you, Kate." He said the words so fiercely she had to force her eyes back to his face, to see the passion there, the strength of the belief he had in her, in them. "You know I love you, and that hasn't changed. You can take as much time as you need, but I won't stop loving you, every part of you, no matter how hard the healing gets."

A choked sob broke free, sneaking past the restraints of her lips, much to her chagrin, and she reached for him again, clutched him hard against her until the fiery pain in her chest was too much and she was forced to loosen her grip. He held her back though, cradled her in his arms like she was some precious treasure he could protect and care for.

She cursed herself when tears threatened to spill down her cheeks.

"God, Castle. I was supposed to be comforting you."

He huffed a surprised chuckle into her crown and stroked a hand down the bow of her spine. "You're doing a fine job, Detective."

The warmth of his embrace and the continuing caress of fingers down her vertebrae caused her mind to go hazy, her brain to mouth filter faltering as she thoughtlessly whispered, "I don't want to be alone tonight."

"Then don't be alone tonight," he suggested softly, but she pulled back and gave him a pained look.

"Rick, I can't-"

"Let me stay," he murmured, framing her face in his hands. "I'm not letting you deal with this alone again, Beckett. Let me be your partner."

She held his eyes, needed to be looking at him for this. "You're more than a partner, Rick. I - I remember that day, lying in the grass, and I just saw you. I focused on you and what you were saying to me, and I just remember thinking, before it went black, that I hoped you knew."

He furrowed his brow and she reached up, smoothed her fingers across the crease like she'd always wanted to.

"Knew what, Kate?"

She inhaled the rich, comforting scent of his aftershave and trailed her tingling fingertips down the side of his face to trace around the cartilage of his ear, the touch of his skin drugging in a way she could never have imagined.

"That I loved you back."

His breathing stuttered and she would never forget the look of shocked awe that rippled through his features and the wide, gleaming smile that eclipsed it all.

"I love you." she repeated with a smile of her own, the words tasting sweeter than honey on her tongue.

His thumb smoothed over her lips and he tilted his forehead into hers.

"Kate, I'm going to kiss you now."

Her eyes were falling closed even as she was nodding her consent and she sighed in a form of relief when his lips claimed hers, a sense of _finally _washing over them both.

He worshipped at her mouth while his hands persisted in their exploration of her bared skin, trekking over the untouched inches of her back, tripping over the clasps of her bra, leaving a trail of heat everywhere he touched and driving her further into sensory overload.

She had to restrain herself from surging into him, from slamming her tender upper body into the delicious wall of his. She'd wanted this for so long, spent too long dreaming about it since she had last tasted him on a crisp, January night under the thin veil of a ruse.

At some point, she'd started walking him backwards towards the bedroom, sliding the buttons of his shirt free from their confines as they went. He shivered and broke away from her when the shirt was hanging open and her skin was pressed hotly against his.

"We don't have to do this, not yet," Castle said hesitantly, his cobalt eyes clouding with desire despite his words and the sweep they did over her newest injury.

She appreciated his chivalry, his caution for her bruised body and his willingness to wait, but she'd had enough with waiting.

"We'll go slow," she murmured in return, leaning forward to stain his neck with an open mouthed kiss. "I want it slow."

He's gentle but pressing a grin to hers as he grips her hips, lifts her into his arms, and carries her the rest of the way to her bedroom.

* * *

_**Thank you if you took the time to read, I truly hope I did this prompt justice. And a huge thanks to Jeanne for the breath taking cover art.**_

**_Feedback is always welcome and so greatly appreciated. _**


End file.
